The Birth of Mystery

Strange sometimes when you get a new perspective on something that you think you are familiar with.

I first read The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins many years ago, but I have recently read it a couple of times thanks to audible.

A habit I have fallen into recently is looking things up on Wikipedia, whenever something occurs to me and for which some clarification might be helpful.

It is helpful to have a constantly available resource for answering simple questions of fact as they arise.

Whatever we might say or think about the usefulness or otherwise of information available through this kind of source I have found it to be almost always both accurate and informative.

Where once upon a time we may have had to struggle with several weighty volumes, now we can just Google it.

I don't think I fully appreciated the significance of this novel until I read a short Wikipedia entry that made it clear that this novel was perhaps the first in its genre.

An inspiration to the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and let's face it, we all love to read a mystery, taxing or otherwise.

The woman in White is on occasion incredibly old-fashioned, which is another way of saying that it is an anthropological insight into the way that society worked around the middle of the 19th century.

It reveals the sensitivity of the times with social position and the lengths that someone will go to for the sake of their place in society, and of course we so take for granted the advances that have been made in such things as how women can be independent and strong that on occasions it seems quite extraordinary that behaviour may have been tempered so differently by circumstances.

History is famously a subject that we are not very good at engendering, but as someone once famously said we must know our history so that we do not make the same mistakes again.

There is much about the world within which The Woman In White is set that does not fit with our modern world view, but it is a journey of insightful splendour, and a great reminder of how far we have travelled.

The author does not digress as much as someone like Victor Hugo, writing at a similar time in France, and something that I love about Hugos' digressions is that they throw a different kind of light upon those things that the author is interested in, whether it be Parisien street slang or the tendency for a people to rebel against society.

There is so much more between the lines, and perhaps it is the benefit of hindsight that enables so much more to be seen within the literature of our predecessors.

Bedknobs And Broomsticks

The memories of childhood are strong. Numerous fixed points remain in memory from that timehowever many years ago.

One such fixed point niggled with me recently, and strangely became clear for the first time.

It feels as if I have known the film bed knobs and broomsticks for the whole of my life, but it was only recently that I actually saw the film for the first time.

Since then, I have watched it three or four times, amazed at having missed it.

But equally amazed, by the extent to which I have so thoroughly enjoyed it.

It seems extraordinary that I should not have seen it before, but then perhaps it is the case that having seen it now, I am able to articulate to myself just exactly why I have enjoyed it so much.

Though it is ostensibly a children’s film, like so much that is of quality written for children it has themes that are both complex and adult.

Adult only in the sense that they are serious and important, particularly in respect of appreciating the shared history of all of us.

At another level, the film is important in the genealogy of film, in that it is one of a small number of films that combine live action with animation.

That it includes David Tomlinson only a few years after his appearance in Mary Poppins is significant, and provides a link between these two films.

But the primary material for the film is British history, most immediately the story of the struggle against Germany, which resulted in so many children being evacuated from the cities.

That three children should find themselves in the house of a witch is the starting point for an adventure, but in the course of the adventure, it is a story of love, and Angela Lansbury discovers that she does have a place in her heart for children after all.

Behind the simplicity of the witchcraft theme, there is another historical theme, that cannot be viewed purely in the context of the 20th-century.

That a raiding party of Germans is beaten back by the magical animation of old weapons and armour is on the one hand a safe and hilarious application of magic, but on the other links with a much deeper strand of belief in the importance of what England stands for.

I cannot help but think that the defeat of the Armada,when the Spanish raised a fleet to invade England and was beaten back by a wind which was said to have been raised by witches.

It is fascinating to see the way in which this simple story possesses a poetic grandeur, whilst telling a simple adventure story such as might come from the hearts of any child.

 I have been amazed that I did not see this film when I was my self a child, but strangely pleased to have seen it even now.

I was surprised to have recognised one of the bit part actors as Bruce Forsyth, is playing the role of Swinburn, the switchblade wielding crook working for the book man.

This was long before he had become established in our culture.